Brief Summary

Smart polar bears that hunt by making portals.

Overall Thoughts

It's pretty meh. I was excited before I got to the description because it seemed like it was hinting at an interesting premise, but in the end, it was just a thing that did a thing in a very straightforward way.

Special Containment Procedures

Object Class: Keter

Keter portal bears?

…

I'm excited for this already.

Armed Observation Site 64 has been established at coordinates [REDACTED] in Northeast Greenland National Park

I don't really see a reason for this to be redacted, especially since there are definitely people who are going to need that information.

Description

If they refuse to communicate with us and can't speak, how do we know that their linguistic skills are roughly equal to that of a ten-year-old human?

If they refuse to communicate with us and can't speak, how do we know that their linguistic skills are roughly equal to that of a ten-year-old human?

It's not that they can't speak; it's that they can't speak human languages due to different vocal apparatus. They have their own language which we can't speak for the same reason. We've been observing them in captivity for a while, and although they don't talk to us, they do talk to each other enough that some linguistic expert at the Foundation has figured out a decent amount of their language. We're just not very good at imitating bear sounds (and bears aren't very good at speaking English — plus they don't want to).

I can un-redact the location; no reason not to.

It's a pretty straightforward premise, but consider this: You're peacefully sailing along in the Caribbean, go through an invisible portal, and suddenly find yourself on an Arctic ice sheet, with no idea where you actually are, and no way of contacting anyone. As you're trying to figure out how not to freeze to death, the polar bears attack. It felt like adding more would just put it over the top into the "trying too hard to be scary" zone.

I posted this a couple days ago. I thought it would be awesome. How could an SCP about sapient polar bears not be awesome?

It was not awesome.
It is back in the sandbox.

I want to make this awesome. I think the problem is this: This should be a good old-fashioned scare-the-shit-out-of-you SCP, where "You were minding your own business; all of a sudden you're freezing in the Arctic, and then the polar bears come and rip you to shreds." and that is not coming across. The area should be this weird frozen graveyard of all kinds of vehicles/people/animals that shouldn't be there. It should be creepy to picture.

Pet SCPs that are very personally frightening for the author can be tough to pull off because you're trying to communicate a specific feeling of fear through a dry, clinical document.

That's how I try to write my skips so I can sympathize. Since you (rightfully) don't wanna trick the original premise out with unnecessary bells and whistles, the best advice I can give is find some really good pictures to get that feeling across visually rather than textually. Good luck.

— With regard to the Foundation/Ethics Committee bit, would it work better if the O5 Committee proposes destruction, the Ethics Committee votes "no," and info about the SCP "somehow" gets to the GOC, which takes matters into its own hands?

— Maybe the travel *should* be two-way, and the bears do jump out the other side and grab people sometimes. They're smart, and try to not be seen, but screwed up and staged an attack in a large city in broad daylight, and the Foundation had to amnestify a bunch of people to cover it up.

— Do an interview with one of them?

— Add an early exploration log where a couple D-class get sent through to check things out.

I said it on the draft, but for some reason I just can't, can't get my head around why they need to be sapient. It just seems weirdly superfluous and I feel it detracts a lot from the horror of the piece (that is, the idea of them being massive, terrifying animalistic killers that someone cannot hope to defend themselves from). Hunting in packs, sure. But the weaponry, language and tool use make them seem… too human. I don't see what making them sapient adds to that, and the descriptions of them as sapient, human-hating, militant magic polar bears just seems too much like a race from a fantasy novel. It also shifts the focus of the article away from what I guess is your true intention with the article, to get across the idea of normal people doing normal things being suddenly and violently torn to pieces by a giant bear. One of the key things I would find scary about the idea is the brutal animal nature of the bears, and it just seems a shame to me to draw the reader's attention in exactly the opposite direction.

I'm hesitant to endorse most of the suggestions you've made.It should be obvious why I don't like the idea of an interview, but I'm not big on the two-way portals either. Another thing I liked about the idea was specifically the idea of suddenly being completely out of your element, enhancing the idea of the victim's situation being utterly hopeless. Having the nasty, terrible stuff invade the mundane is certainly a good way to emphasize horror, but two-way portals again seems to draw the reader away from the key, powerful image which you want to impress on the reader in the piece.

However, I wholeheartedly agree about the exploration log. I really do believe that the central idea you're trying to get across is a good one, and a scary one - giving a direct account via exploration log is probably the best way to lay that information out to the reader in a way where it isn't mitigated by the dry and clinical writing style.

Obviously, I'm only one guy and no-one else seems to echo my sentiments re: sapience. I just feels as if the key problem I had with it was that you drew too much focus away from that central image, and that the idea needs to be pared down and refocused in such a way as to emphasize the bits that could be really effective.

SCP-1561 starts as a distortion located in [REDACTED] that is causing ships to disappear. Initial explorers sent through are lost, and tracking equipment was never found. (This was maybe 50 years in the past.) The field would disappear and reappear within the same general area, so a task force was setup to find it after each disappearance and relocate it so they could continue to direct ships away from it.

During this time, they figure out how to detect its presence using [REDACTED] technology which greatly simplified containment.

Over the next few decades, [REDACTED] was incorporated into satellites launched in space, and that's when the Foundation (and GOC) found out the phenomenon was more widespread than initially thought, and appeared to be responsible for ██% of missing person reports world wide. The source was eventually tracked to Greenland where the Foundation and GOC located a graveyard of abandoned vehicles and a lot of polar bears that appeared to be hunting in pack structures. Some of the bears were observed to be wearing garments. A group would often gather shortly before fauna or vehicles taken from elsewhere appeared in the area, and would then proceed to aggressively attack.

The Foundation captured several specimens and established a small colony elsewhere under containment, but were ultimately unable to determine the source of the portal effect. SCP-1561 is more intelligent than non-anomalous polar bears, but it's difficult to assess their full potential due to their aggressiveness to everything that's not them. In the meantime, AOS-64 was setup in collaboration with the GOC and provided support as the wild population was completely exterminated (by the GOC.)

Shortly after the extermination, the portal activity completely ceased in the area. AOS-64 was left as an observation site to monitor the area for activity. A number of years later, contact with the site was lost. All individuals staffing the site are MIA. At the same time, the population of SCP-1561 has completely recovered and portal activity has restarted.

AOS-64 has been restaffed and re-purposed to attempt rescue of individuals caught by portals, pruning the the SCP-1561 population, and research into the nature and cause of the portal effect.

The bears are slightly more intelligent than normal polar bears, and obviously behave differently acting in a pack and all, but they wouldn't be the true anomaly. Not that the Foundation has an easy way of finding out the true story.

The clothing may throw some people off, but anyone on the internet should know that people love to put clothes on their pets. The twist I had in mind is that something out there is keeping pet bears, and like someone tossing goldfish to an oscar, they are throwing people and other animals to their cute little furry buddies.

After the extermination event, they took care of the intrusion then went down to the store to pick up a new litter.

As you might have guessed, I have not had time to write lately. But I had an idea for taking this even further down this path:

Make it a -EX. It turns out the bears are only barely anomalous — a bit smarter than the average real polar bear, and much more trainable, but they have no special abilities other than that. It's SCP-████, living alongside them and using them like we use guard dogs, that makes the portals. It's their way of taking care of the local food shortage, and they're also curious about human technology.

In the end, the Foundation is working on tracking down the SCP-████ population, and ends up breeding some slightly anomalous bears itself to train up for the Foundation Bear Guard Program.